One of the more disturbing trends in academia has been the wave of “trigger warnings” popping up across college campuses.
Trigger warnings are attached to potentially offensive speech, imagery or writing. The notices are purportedly necessary to protect students from potentially objectionable material.
Most recently, San Bernardino Community College District Chancellor Bruce Baron resisted calls for disclaimers on college course material.
Last month, complaints were made about the content of four graphic novels included in a literature course at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa. The illustrated books were said to have warranted warnings because of their depictions of sex and violence.
In response, the National Coalition Against Censorship sent a letter objecting to such notices on the grounds that “they pose a significant threat to the methods and goals of higher education.”
As the coalition discussed in its letter, and as has been seen across the country, trigger warnings can have a chilling effect on the sorts of material presented in college courses, as well as contributing to a climate in which hypersensitivity suppresses the sort of discourse colleges are supposed to foster.
We applaud the decision to push back against disclaimers for this reason.
Unfortunately, there is much more work to do to convince activist college students, who all too often push for warnings on expressions of political ideas they simply don’t approve of.
Last November, the student government at UC Riverside called on the school to warn students about offensive political demonstrations on campus.
They were reacting to a campus anti-abortion group exercising its First Amendment rights to assemble and demonstrate at the publicly funded campus.
The UCR Associated Students were concerned that the demonstration “may be triggering” because the group included the statement “abortion is wrong” in its slogans.
Such demonstrations, the students argued, can “make students question their actual freedom of choice while faced with open criticism.”
How a demonstration does this isn’t exactly clear, but the notion that adult students need to be warned away from ideas conflicting with their own goes against the spirit of higher education.
Whatever one thinks of graphic novels – also called comic books – with violent or sexual content, or the abortion debate itself, colleges ought to be places where ideas and concepts are freely exchanged.
Whether this exchange takes the form of class content or political demonstrations, colleges should resist efforts to curtail this noble purpose.